Career Opportunities

Statistics Department graduates have an excellent record of placement and further advancement. The demand for well-trained statisticians at both the Master's and Ph.D. levels is strong. The solid grounding students receive here in theoretical, applied, and computational statistics makes them especially valued in scientific, industrial and government settings where issues are complex and data are often difficult to collect or incomplete and where there are no easy answers.

In 2009, graduates employed in government and industry are involved in many interesting and important projects. As a program director at the National Cancer Institute, Michelle Dunn (Ph.D., 2005) supports statistics research in oncology through creating funding opportunities and disseminating information about funding. Philip R. Scinto (M.S., 1987) is a Technical Fellow for the Lubrizol Corporation. His current responsibilities include the application of statistical methods to engine oil testing and calibration, product and formulation development and optimization, and product approvals, while his research interests include supersaturated designs and process adjustment. Dean Follmann (Ph.D., 1985) is chief of the Biostatistics Research Branch at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, part of the National Institutes of Health. He heads a group of 15 Ph.D. statisticians who conduct collaborative and methodological research.

Other graduates are working in 2009 in academia. Fabrizio Ruggeri (M.S., 1989) is a research director at the Institute of Applied Mathematics and Information Technology at the Italian National Research Council in Milano, and International Professor Associate at Polytechnic Institute, New York University. Giovanni Parmigian (Ph.D., 1990) just started on a new position as the Chair of the Department of Biostatistics and Computational Biology at Harvard's Dana Farber Cancer Institute. He continues work on studying cancer genetics from a statistical perspective. Woncheol Jang (Ph.D., 2003), as assistant professor of biostatistics at the University of Georgia, works on source detection and multiple testing problems in astronomy and biomedical research. Lynne Steuerle Schofield (Ph.D., 2008) is an assistant professor of statistics in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at Swarthmore College in Swarthmore, PA.

Nonprofits in 2009 are attracting our grads, also. After several years working at several non-profit organizations, including the Science and Human Rights Program of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Jana Asher (M.S. 1999) has founded and is the Executive Director of a non-profit statistical consultation firm called StatAid.

Over the years, graduates employed in government and industry have been involved in many interesting and important projects. Jason Connor (M.S., 2000) collaborates on projects big and small (from large NIH grants to pilot studies with 8 sheep) with 27 (at last count) departments throughout the Cleveland Clinic Foundation. A biostatistican in the Collaborative Biostatistics Center within the Department of Biostatistics and Epidemiology, he designs experiments, analyzes results, and co-authors manuscripts for medical journals. Daniel Cork (Ph.D., 2000) is a research associate at the Committee on National Statistics (part of the National Academies/National Research Council), where he supports the work of two major panels reviewing the 2000 Census and planning for the 2010 Census. He is also involved in coordinating workshops on software engineering in defense systems testing and on the testing of complex computer-assisted survey instruments. Dean Follmann (Ph.D., 1986) and Todd Sahlroot (Ph.D., 1985) do research on clinical trials and statistical modeling of biomedical data for the National Institutes of Health. At the Rand Corporation, Lionel Galway (Ph.D., 1988) has looked at the trends in jury verdicts in civil liability cases to see if monetary awards have increased significantly over the years. Sybil Crawford (Ph.D., 1989) is a Senior Scientist at the New England Research Institutes (NERI). She recently won a Young Investigator award from the North American Menopause Society for her work on the relative roles of behavioral factors and menopause in weight gain. At the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, Ruth Etzioni (Ph.D., 1990) has studied bone marrow transplant patients and techniques, and screening tools and outcome measures for prostate cancer treatment. At Los Alamos National Laboratory, Mark Fitzgerald (Ph.D., 1995) has developed a graphical tool to assist engineers at Proctor & Gamble in exploring dependencies among components of manufacturing processes. Cristina Ilangakoon (M.S., 1996) works for Marketing and Planning Systems, a market research firm whose clients are Fortune 100 companies. As a Reasearch Scientist at CTB/McGraw-Hill, Richard Patz (Ph.D., 1996) examines national trends in educational performance, and develops models for analyzing and comparing state- and national-level standardized educational tests.

Other graduates in the past decade have chosen careers in academia and are beginning to take on leadership roles in the scholarly community. Tom Nichols (Ph.D., 2001), an assistant professor of biostatistics at the University of Michigan, works on functional brain image data, used by cognitive neuroscientists to understand how the brain works. At Oregon State, Alix Gitelman (Ph.D., 2000) works on a variety of consulting and applied problems with students and researchers in agriculture, forestry, fisheries and wildlife, atmospheric sciences, and environmental sciences. Kathy Blackmond Laskey (Ph.D., 1986) is an associate professor of Systems Engineering at George Mason University, where she works on problems in Bayesian decision theory and machine learning. Allan Rossman (Ph.D., 1990) is chair, Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, Dickinson College, and has developed the Workshop Statistics approach to teaching elementary statistics through activities. Tom Short (Ph.D., 1992) teaches Statistics at Villanova University, and co-directs with Allan Rossman the NSF-funded STATS project, which helps mathematicians with little statistics background teach statistics. Giovanni Parmigiani (Ph.D., 1991) is on the faculty at the Institute of Statistics and Decision Sciences (ISDS) at Duke University, where he is collaborating on a comprehensive model of breast cancer risk. He also works on fast computing algorithms for model selection. Dalene Stangl (Ph.D., 1992), also on the ISDS faculty, recently earned the W. J. Younden award for work on Bayesian hierarchical models published in the journal Statistics in Medicine. Also at Duke University is Herbie Lee (Ph.D., 1999), a post-doc working on a multi-disciplinary NSF-funded project studying the flow of groundwater with environmental cleanup applications. As an assistant professor in the Department of Statistics at Ohio State University, Mario Peruggia (Ph.D., 1991) studies applications and computing methods in Bayesian statistics, and has recently published a monograph on discrete iterated function systems. Elizabeth Slate (Ph.D., 1992) joined the faculty at Cornell University, and is currently an associate editor of the Journal of Computational and Graphical Statistics.

Some Government Agencies Employing M.S. & Ph.D. Graduates

National Institutes of Health
National Security Agency
U.S. Bureau of the Census
U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics
U.S. Food and Drug Administration

Some Academic Institutions Employing Ph.D. Graduates

Case Western Reserve University
Cornell University
University of Kentucky
Dickinson College
Duke University
Harvard University
George Mason University
Johns Hopkins University
National Taiwan University
Ohio State University
Queen's University
San Diego State University
SUNY at Albany
Texas A&M University
Trinity University
University of Michigan
University of Minnesota
University of Pittsburgh
University of Pennsylvania
University of Waterloo
Villanova University